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Summary
Summary
#65533;#65533;Qu#65533; estar#65533;as dispuesto a hacer por la inmortalidad? #65533;Qu#65533; entregar#65533;as... o a qui#65533;n?#65533; Piensas que todo est#65533; bien. Eres feliz. Entonces tu jefe te encarga un trabajo extraoficial, nada muy complicado, se trata solamente de conseguir una casa para un exc#65533;ntrico conde rumano. Una casa cerca de una barranca. Y cuando crees que has terminado con tu labor, te das cuenta de que tu pesadilla en esa casa, de ventanas tapiadas y sin espejos, apenas comienza. La sangre es tan roja hoy como hace cinco siglos... tan dulce en la Ciudad de M#65533;xico como en la lejana Rumania... Yves Navarro ser#65533; testigo impotente del precio que tiene la vida eterna. La sangre, la vida, lo que m#65533;s se quiere... entregar#65533; todo para no perderlo. Y al final, #65533;quedar#65533; algo? ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Life is good, everything is in order and you are happy. Then your boss gives you an unofficial assignment. Nothing complicated. He needs you to find a house for an eccentric Rumanian count, a house close to a ravine. Just when you thought your job was done, you realize that the nightmare has just begun. In this house without mirrors and walled windows, blood flows as fresh as it did five centuries before... and as sweet in Mexico City as in far away Rumania.
Author Notes
Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama on November 11, 1928. He studied law at the National University of Mexico and did graduate work at the Institute des Hautes Etudes in Switzerland. He entered Mexico's diplomatic service and wrote in his spare time. His first novel, Where the Air Is Clear, was published in 1958. His other works include The Death of Artemio Cruz, Destiny and Desire, and Vlad. The Old Gringo was later adapted as a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda in 1989. He won numerous awards including the Fuentes the Romulo Gallegos Prize in Venezuela for Terra Nostra, the National Order of Merit in France, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for literature in 1994.
He also wrote essays, short stories, screenplays, and political nonfiction. In addition to writing, he taught at numerous universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Brown. He served as the ambassador of Mexico to France. He died on May 15, 2012 at the age of 83.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Narrator Robert Fass's crisp narration enhances this audio edition of Fuentes's riff on Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which the undead eponymous antihero travels to Mexico City for blood (having drained all of Europe's supply). As in the original, the first-person narration is by a young attorney-one of many parallel plot developments that will bemuse Stoker fans. The Mexican setting calls for convincing Spanish accents, which Fass ably handles. He also demonstrates versatility in creating unique voices for the book's many characters. As with other fantastic stories, listeners will only suspend disbelief if the story's everyday elements are convincing. And Fass's matter-of-fact delivery of passages such as the description of Navarro's breakfast routine, lulls listeners into imagining that the supernatural elements are fully believable. A must for Dracula fans. A Dalkey Archive hardcover. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN Carlos Fuentes died in May at age 83, he left behind an impressive legacy and an eclectic body of work. Novels like the sprawling, Joycean "Terra Nostra" placed him at the center of the Latin American Boom of the 1970s, alongside such greats as Cortázar and García Márquez. But later books were often just as ambitious, returning to themes like the corruption of ideals. The short novel "Vlad" (first published in Spanish as part of Fuentes's 2004 collection "Inquieta Compañía") provides ample evidence of Fuentes's powerful abilities. The book documents the "awful adventure" of Yves Navarro after his wife helps a respected lawyer find a house in Mexico City for a mysterious European refugee, Vladimir Radu, later revealed to be the infamous historical figure turned vampire Vlad the Impaler. Dark humor dominates the novel's early pages, with Navarro mystified by the client's requests for a house that is "remote . . . easy to defend against intruders . . . with a ravine out back." The client also wants blackened windows and an escape tunnel. During Navarro's initial visit, he notices that "a great number of drains ran along the walls of the ground floor, as though our client was expecting a flood any day now." Radu wears a ridiculous wig and glue-on mustache, and his manservant's demeanor owes no small debt to Marty Feldman's performance in "Young Frankenstein." From the disconnect between what the narrator knows (nothing) and what the reader understands (everything), Fuentes nurses both comedy and foreboding. "Tell your wife that I am breathing her scent," Radu says to Navarro, and the discombobulated husband replies: "Yes, I will. How very gallant." Fuentes clearly knew that farce can become repetitious, and he layers in perfectly realized glimpses of the relationship between Navarro and his wife, Asunción. He revels in the details of their boisterous love life and long breakfasts. He also adds emotional impact through an account of the drowning death of the couple's son. "The sea never returned him," Navarro says. "And so his absence was doubled. Asunción and I do not have any memory, as terrible as it would be, of a dead body. . . . I am incapable of hearing the break of a wave without thinking that a trace of my son, turned to salt and foam, is coming back to us." This sense of sadness becomes infused with creepiness and fear when Radu surreptitiously enters the couple's sanctuary: "From then on, the bedroom was no longer mine. It became a strange room because someone had walked out." Later, when Asunción goes missing, along with their daughter, Navarro chooses to interpret his search for them as "the greatest moment of our love." But all is not as it seems, and the statement so misjudges his relationship with Asunción that those words encapsulate both the earnestness and absurdity of the novel. "Vlad" inevitably shifts toward the Grand Guignol and the decadent despite such personal moments. A meal of organs, the glimpsed remains of a "huge, indescribable animal" and a cache of subterranean coffins are all vampire clichés, but somehow Fuentes refreshes tired tropes. The novel is genuinely scary. The final act is ushered in with a sweeping litany of Vlad's evil history, followed by truly unexpected horrors - including the gratuitous use of squirrels in a sequence in which "campy" and "surreal" more or less French kiss. When rodents are being shoved down your pants, you know things aren't going to end well. Will readers appreciate a novel that pivots between hilarity and fear, insightful characterization and flamboyant fountains of blood? Let's hope so, because "Vlad" displays the strengths of a great writer's late oeuvre to excellent effect. Jeff VanderMeer's most recent novel is "Finch." With his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he edited "The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories."
Library Journal Review
In his last published novel before he died, the iconic Fuentes dabbles in the gothic in a haunting tale of vampires whose hapless victims try to extricate themselves from a nefarious scheme. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
